German education minister accused of copying in class

Yet another German politician has fallen victim to the increasingly common accusation of academic plagiarism. The German Education and Research Minister Annette Schavan has been accused of plagiarising parts of her research in the PhD thesis she wrote in 1980.

The claims were made by an anonymous website – Schavanplag – set up specifically to pick holes in the dissertation.

Speaking to the press this week, Schavan said that her accusers should come forward and make their accusations in person if they wanted to talk to her about her PhD in Educational Sciences - titled "Person and Conscience: Studies on conditions, need and requirements of today's consciences" and submitted to Dusseldorf University.

The anonymous accuser has set up a detailed WordPress site that goes through the PhD paragraph by paragraph reporting passages where her text resembles that of other published authors.

So far no one from the site has come forward to take the minister up on her offer.

Pointing out plagiarism in university work has become a popular form of mud-slinging in the German Parliament. Defence Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, branded Baron Cut-and-Paste by the German media, left office in 2011 after it was found he had copied large parts of his 2006 law doctorate awarded by the University of Bayreuth.

German MEP Jorgo Chatzimarkakis had his Political Sciences PhD from Bonn University revoked in 2011 after the university found that over half of it was incorrectly referenced and long passages were copied from foreign works. Chatzimarkakis notably claimed that he'd picked up his bad, poor-attribution ways during a stint at Oxford.

But the Teutonic bitchfight looks tame compared to the antics of Yahoo!, which recently claimed in an SEC filing that CEO Scott Thompson has a degree in computer science when he actually only has one in accounting. It was also discovered that his university didn't even offer computer science degrees until four years after he left. ®